OK Go's Rube Goldberg music video

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OK Go shot a fantastic Rube Goldberg contraption video for their new song "This Too Shall Pass." The MAKE team race car makes an appearance at around 3:00 minutes into the video.

The contraption was built by Syyn Labs. Adam Sadowsky of Syyn Labs wrote:

The requirements were that it had to be interesting, not "overbuilt" or too technology-heavy, and easy to follow. The machine also had to be built on a shoestring budget, synchronize with beats and lyrics in the music and end on time over a 3.5 minute song, play a part of the song, and be filmed in one shot. To make things more challenging still, the space chosen was divided into two floors and the machine would use both.

Look for a "making of" article written by Adam in a forthcoming issue of MAKE magazine.

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One day, some crafty gentleman will develop a Rube Goldberg Von Neumann machine, which will develop out of control, overpowering its creators, deconstructing the great works of Man, turning the entire world into an overly complicated contraption, dedicated to making more overly complicated contraptions, which link into each other, augmenting and improving, using their mechanical energy to start others anew, in a eternal cycle of clinks, clangs and gunshots, until finally, when hope is all but lost, Humanity is saved by a misfiring trebuchet and the whole thing comes to a grinding halt.

Very cool, but I wonder if some of it wasn’t triggered manually. Some of the steps look like there’d be too much variation in duration to synch up to music as well as it is. Plus, they would have lost a LOT of TVs to test runs.

@ lobster: we did lose a lot of tvs. you can see them in the background. but the TV smash happened close to the end, and most of the stuff that followed was bigger and thus more predictable. When things went wrong, it usually went wrong on the first floor. re: sync there were cues to start sections of the song at their corresponding parts of the sequence to help with that. The durations of parts was surprisingly consistent.

what i love the most is how the machine branches a bit to create effects on the actors (balls falling, etc) and does other work that is not a necessary part of moving the machine forward. And yet, it continues its unstoppable path to conclusion.

Awesome video, though it would’ve been even more awesome if they’d used a song from that album which doesn’t already have an official music video- All Is Not Lost or Needing/Getting would’ve been fun to watch.

“there were cues to start sections of the song at their corresponding parts of the sequence”

That is so simple it’s brilliant. Why sync the machine to the song when you can sync the song to the machine? Should have thought of that when my inner troll was telling me it was impossible. Hats off to you.

The original is musch cooler, lasts 30 minutes, is made in the eighties (1987)
It has already been copied by Honda (still pretty cool) and now OK GO. It’s a nice clip, well done, but the song is a bit lame and the idea is a bit old, while they don’t really update it and do something new with it (except more complexity and obviously a bigger budget)

So personally i think the clip is just a bit uninspired, sings of a band trying hard to relive the excitement and flow of their first lo-fi, small budget genius fitness idea.